"The citizen of a ruin"

pp. 33-69

in: David Williams, Writing postcommunism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

without a firm roof over his head, his literary house (whatever that meant) has been destroyed, and with it his personal and literary biography. ... He is a representative of a world which no longer exists, a tragi-comic being, a tightrope-walker overburdened with mental baggage, the citizen of a ruin, an eternal exile, neither here nor there, homeless, stateless, a nostalgic, a zombie, a writer without readers, a travelling salesman selling goods either nibbled by moths or peppered by shells. ... He is a loser, a seller of souvenirs of a vanished epoch and vanished landscapes, an incompatible being, both despairing and deceiving at the same time, former, from every point of view.1